For reporters to treat this issue like just another political squabble is journalistic malpractice. Indeed, relating the debate in value-neutral he-said-she-said language is actively helping spread the lie.

The Hobbit will be three movies, rather than the two originally planned, or the one that a brisk telling of the tale might require.

I'm sure I'll nerd out happily over the detail and the material from the LOTR appendices, but the straightforward adventure story is part of the book's charm. Maybe a special edition There and Back Again DVD will be available to purists.

And maybe with all the extra time he can find a way to include the scouring of the Shire in this trilogy.

This essay on Tolkien and technology raises the relationship between magic and machines but somehow manages to avoiding citing Clarke's famous line ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). Hobbits are happy enough to have their bucolic lifestyle protected by the magic/technology of others.

Top university officials, and UNC system President Tom Ross, have repeatedly said the academic scandal that has now engulfed one of the nation’s top public universities isn’t about athletics...

...But the three professors who wrote the faculty report said they found a wide gulf between academics and athletics at the university that is fostering an environment where academic misconduct could flourish, while simultaneously discouraging faculty and staff from helping athletes who truly want an education. They called UNC-CH “a campus with two cultures,” particularly with regard to the two money-making sports, football and men’s basketball, that underwrite the Athletic Department’s roughly $75 million annual budget.

The nature of Sandusky's crime made the PSU situation worse, but the business of amateur sports stinks in a lot of places.

Jul 29, 2012

Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

In what may be an unprecedented move for an N&R editor, Jeff Gauger uses his Sunday column (unposted, sadly UPDATE: the column, or a version of it, at Gauger's blog /update) to call out the Rhino for slack reporting on the recent push-polling story.

The daily paper ceded the free-weekly market to the Hammer brothers without a fight, then spent years pretending its highly visible competitor didn't exist. Not punching down makes sense, but the N&R seemed to be in denial.

Gauger shouldn't make a habit of it -- his plans to beef up political reporting, if realized, will speak for him -- but a little correctivity was long overdue.

Jul 27, 2012

Chose the song for the season and the feeling; finding out about the 78 RPM thing was serendipity.

My dad had a couple of boxes of 78s that I guess he had trouble throwing away. Lisa and I had a couple of milk crates of LPs in her parents' basement until they sold their house. I guess our CDs are next. And so back to yesterday's post about bit rot.

Right on schedule, the Rhino proclaims GSO's new recycling plan to be a dud.

As someone who voiced concern over long-term vendor lock-in during the White Street debate, I think contract length is a valid issue.

Funny, though, that the proposed 15-year contract for White Street was supported by the Rhino, while the length of the old 15-year recycling deal was "ridiculous" and the new 10-year recycling contract is much too long.

Complaining about Cal Thomas columns is like complaining about the weather.

Asking why the N&R runs this stuff on a regular basis may be slightly more productive.

But challenging the decision to run this particular column -- complete with the headline "Suppose Bachmann is right?" -- is an imperative.

The column argues that Michele Bachmann's unsubstantiated allegations against a State Department official of Arab descent should not be criticized because, well, there really are threats from Islamic extremists.

The latter point is not in doubt.

It's Bachmann's use of that reality to smear people that's at issue, and that's the issue Thomas elides completely. The columnist tries to preempt charges of McCarthyism, but this is a definitional case, with a racist twist.

I expect that kind of stuff from Cal Thomas, but I expect better of my local newspaper.

Jul 26, 2012

I don't eat much fast food these days, but Chick-fil-A has long been one of the best options in that category. Also, a friend who works there has some special needs and they've been good to him and good for him, and, also, DeanDome food, so I've been a happy occasional customer, even if that ad campaign with the cows makes me want to go Elvis on my teevee.

The personal beliefs of the CEO are inconsequential to me, but reports of donations by the corporation to anti-gay groups give me pause -- I don't want to make even small contributions to that funding stream.

This, though, is not the way to protest. "Perhaps Rahm Emanuel is motivated by beneficent ends, or maybe he’s motivated by political considerations and a love of his own power, but either way, abusing his power to punish views he dislikes is at least as offensive as — and definitely more dangerous than — the targeted views themselves."

My old Radio blog posts made the move to this site, but the comments -- thousands of them -- didn't migrate and they seem to be lost from the archive. That's a shame, there was some good stuff in there, and maybe some insights into the early days of this medium.

I spoke to Vint Cerf a while back about the bitrot problem, of which this is a cousin. He said:

We need to step back and think about how to combat this tendency to lose information...The historians, of course, are beside themselves, because more and more information about our society is in online form...We start to lose track of what people did, and what actually happened, because we can't see it anymore, can't read it.

Irony alert: That interview with Cerf lives on a site that has seen several siblings disappear in the wake of ownership and staff changes, and may at some point be at risk of going poof as well.

Fueled by investor appetite for asset-backed securities, the financial institution private student loan market grew from less than $5 billion in 2001 to over $20 billion in 2008, before contracting to less than $6 billion in 2011.

From 2005 – 2007, lenders increasingly marketed and disbursed loans directly to students, reducing the involvement of schools in the process...many students borrowed more than they needed to finance their education. Additionally, during this period, lenders were more likely to originate loans to borrowers with lower credit scores than they had previously been. These trends made private student loans riskier for consumers.

It's not an original thought that our culture moved from one style of heedless self-indulgence to others as the Boomers aged, but I am reminded of Austin Powers: "No doubt, love, but as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I'll be sound as a pound!"

Jul 25, 2012

Probably not fair to blame Delta for 2 hour delays both yesterday and today on a round trip to LGA -- weather happens on summer afternoons -- but one former USAirways regular who happened to be on both flights with me said tonight that she kind of blamed them, anyway. Might as well get used to it. I'm about ready for my HondaJet.

I never know exactly what a restaurant means by rare, medium-rare, etc., so when I order a steak I say, I never know exactly what a restaurant means by rare, medium-rare, etc., so I'd just like mine cooked with a warm, pink center.

And every time the server asks if I mean whatever their translation of that doneness might be, e.g., "so...medium rare?"

Robbie Perkins says via FB that GSO is participating in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, described at the site as "a competition to inspire American cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life."

Perkins: "Have not defined the entry yet but we are working on several ideas."

I propose using some of our expensive solid waste to power a fleet of downtown food trucks, thus killing two birds with one stone (the birds could then be served by the food trucks, so there's a recycling component). Monetizing our garbage would fund the public portion of the downtown performing arts center, and the $5 million grand prize is used to bribe teenagers to avoid downtown and soundproof the dwellings of landlords.

Collaboration and iteration and standing on the shoulders of giants are the way a lot of things get done. And even then they happen in a larger world of which they are very much a part.

A couple of weeks before Obama made the unremarkable point that businesses and the people who build them rely on infrastructure and other externalities, I wrote this for a day-job blog focused on innovation:

Sitting in the airport in my hometown of Greensboro, NC, I was not far from the testing facilities for the new, ultra-small planes being built by HondaJet.There you have the same democratization process at work — not everyone will be able to afford them, but, still, personal jets. And yet even this engineering genius doesn’t stand alone — it must make its way through all kinds of red tape before coming to market, and success depends on the availability of everything from jet fuel to airspace, over which the manufacturers have no control.

I thought back to an innovation that helped build Greensboro at the end of the 19th Century — locating cotton mills in the South, near the cotton fields, rather than the river valleys of New England. And that innovation, too, was contingent on many external factors, including the innovations known as the railroad and the electric grid.

I even created a new tag at the blog, called "externalities." And of course a lot of externalities, including some imposed by governments, are negative. And some government interventions that make people and and nations rich for generations are negative for other people (ask a Native American).

It's pretty straightfoward until you mix in the politics and make it stupid.

Hints that manufacturing may shift back to the US have been accumulating for some time -- I just saw some data supporting that meme in a global survey of c-level execs conducted for the day job -- but this article indicates that a lot of the work will be done by robots.

A few jobs beats no jobs, but it doesn't sound like a magic bullet for our unemployment woes.

Jul 18, 2012

The SBI report lists 19 victims of murder in 2010, and 41 victims in 2011. The actual number of murder victims in Greensboro is 17 in 2010 and 25 in 2011. Discrepancies in other crime categories also exist and the department believes that these discrepancies may extend back to 2004, when the reporting software was first implemented in the department.

Jul 17, 2012

Five Register of Deeds offices in North Carolina have written Attorney General Roy Cooper asking for a revised opinion on the tax exemption currently given to the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association (Freddie Mac). Guilford, Davidson, Caldwell, Duplin, and Davie Counties signed on to the letter dated June 28.

Some of the best tasting fried chicken and fish your taste buds have had in months is up for sale. For $8.00 a plate you can get chicken or fish, fried to your satisfaction. Collards, green beans, mac`n cheese, potato salad, slaw, cornbread, cake or banana pudding, tea or lemonade. All seasoned to perfection to satisfy even the most hungry that will just walk in the door.

On Friday July 20, 2012 starting at 11:30 am the feast will be on. Eat in or take out. We aim to please your stomach.

Call in orders (574-0065) if your time is short and we will have your food ready when you get here.